Gambling team or group affiliation detection utilizing radio-frequency identification (rfid) chips or other rfid items

This application claims priority from provisional patent application 60/980,450 filed 17 Oct. 2007 and incorporated herein by reference.

Pursuant to 37 C.F.R. 1.71(e), applicant notes that a portion of this disclosure contains material that is subject to and for which is claimed copyright protection (such as, but not limited to, source code listings, screen shots, user interfaces, or user instructions, or any other aspects of this submission for which copyright protection is or may be available in any jurisdiction). The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records. All other rights are reserved, and all other reproduction, distribution, creation of derivative works based on the contents, public display, and public performance of the application or any part thereof are prohibited by applicable copyright law.

The present invention in various embodiments is directed to business methods and/or logic processing methods and/or related systems and/or apparatus and/or methods to facilitate identification of users (such as human players in a casino) as possibly being related by identifying a group of objects at one location and scanning and/or identifying those objects at later times to determine that various users of the objects are related. More specifically, the invention involves a system and methods for detecting potential gambling teams in a gaming casino. In specific embodiments, the invention determines that there may be one or more possibly related users without issuing electronically readable cards or tags or dongles to a human user, but solely by tracking the movement of identifiable objects that are handled or used by a user (such as gaming chips or other gaming pieces or of other objects.

The discussion of any work, publications, sales, or activity anywhere in this submission, including in any documents submitted with this application, shall not be taken as an admission that any such work constitutes prior art. The discussion of any activity, work, or publication herein is not an admission that such activity, work, or publication existed or was known in any particular jurisdiction.

Schemes to fraudulently obtain money or credits from casinos or gaming houses by manipulating card play and/or credit devices, such as chips, are known. In one such scheme, a number of different players cooperate in card counting at one or more blackjack tables to affect the odds sufficiently to win large amounts from the house. A very well known instance is the MIT blackjack team.

Effective strategies to combat team card counting have remained elusive. In the case of the MIT blackjack team, computer facial recognition of team members was used and when the casino realized that banned members were being replaced by other students, MIT yearbooks were scanned to add to the facial recognition database.

At present, casinos rely primarily on face recognition of known cheats and observation of persons with whom they associate. One unfair advantage of concern is multiple people card counting.

While team based cheating has been often associated with the game of blackjack, teams can also cheat at other casino games, such as roulette. In this case, or in other games, a function of the team members is to distract the croupier in order to allow a different better to change their bet.

Thus there is a need for improved or effectively determining that multiple players are working in cooperation or have some type of relationship. In some cases, it is desired to accomplish this without issuing any type of electronically trackable electronic identification to a player.

According to specific embodiments, the present invention provides that RFID enabled gaming chips or are tracked and the movement of such chips analyzed so that gambling teams can be detected. In further embodiments, other chip activity, such as theft, can also be monitored. In further embodiments, the methods as described herein for detecting relationships among players other by tracking the activity of groups of individually identifiable RFID tagged gaming pieces can also be used to detect relationships among others, such as customers of a retail establishment (e.g., a grocery store, sporting goods store, or gun shop) where a group of items is identified at purchase and individual items are later identified by authorized personnel, such as at a point of use or disposal.

According to specific embodiments of the invention, the invention determines chip groups as well as expected chip location. In various situations, the invention is able to identify groups that commingle chips during game play and/or before cash out. Methods and systems of the invention can defeat stealth-based behavior of gaming teams and does not necessarily rely on video cameras to determine that people are physically exchanging chips.

According to specific embodiments of the invention, chips purchased together are registered as belonging to a group when distributed by the casino. As chips are exchanged within the casino, their location is tracked as well. All activity for a chip is date and time stamped.

One or more rule sets (e.g., executed by an information processing system) uses the group identification stored for two or more chips and date and time stamped activity for two or more chips to identify that two or more players may be related. For example if a BET is made at gaming table 5 at 2:05 PM with a chip from GROUP X, and one minute later a BET is made at gaming table 10 (500 feet away) with a chip also from GROUP X, a typical rule set will trigger an event, because the collected data indicates a probability that two different players are related, and therefore perhaps part of a gambling team.

Each event triggered can then be analyzed according to a rule set, which directs appropriate actions to be taken. For example, an event might cause photos of each of the players to be taken and compared to a list of known gambling teams and/or known cheats or banned players.

A system of the invention in further embodiments can include logic that can also detect chips that have been improperly taken from a location such as the vault or a gaming table tray. For example, if a player brings a chip back to the cashier, but the chip has as its location IN_TRAY, there is an indication that the chip was stolen from a gaming tray. This can provide added functionality for team detection according to specific embodiments of the invention.